Exfm Puts Web’s Music Within Easy Reach – Now It’s Ready for Primetime

There’s arguably more music on the web than on any music service, but playing it isn’t as easy as pressing play on an iPod. MP3 blogs alone bring a wealth of fascinating stuff to hear. The thing is, pretty much nobody has 27 hours per day to read the web looking for tunes.

This is where exfm, which launched lots of new features on Wednesday, comes in. We liked it back when it was a Google Chrome browser extension and when it made the leap to the iPhone. Now, exfm is set to attract a whole new crowd with a revamped web app anyone can use; helpful new discovery features that don’t rely on the user’s knowledge of where music is; and by offering extensions for Safari and Firefox in addition to Chrome, which make it easier to play and bookmark music as you browse elsewhere.

Now, exfm offers more ways to find those songs. You can visit the MP3 blog where the songs live using a supported browser, but that’s just the beginning. The new website includes Search, Album of the Week, Genre, Trending, Monthly Mixtape, and Tastemakers sections, so you don’t have to know about any MP3 blogs to find lots of great music. Crucially, you can Love tracks as you go — because what’s discovery without memory? Nothing, Lebowski.

Exfm also now imports your exfm-using friends from Facebook, Last.fm, or Twitter. If none of your friends use exfm, you can follow recommended users instead, to see what they Love.

“With the release of our next-generation platform, exfm is poised to capitalize on the explosion of free music on the web,” said exfm founder and CEO Dan Kantor. “Ex.fm’s new ‘push play’ experience combined with our browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari make exam the best way for fans to discover all the music the web has to offer.”

The long and the short of it: Exfm is now ready for the average user, who doesn’t even need to install an extension (which is actually really easy) to enjoy all sorts of excellent music on the web and iOS using this free service. In addition to the major changes described above, it added the following tweaks:

A new Mini Site Player lets participating music blogs include an exfm player on their sites, so visitors can stream everything on the page without downloading it, even if they don’t have an exfm browser extension.

You can find people who Loved the same tracks as you; check out all recently-Loved tracks on the whole service; shuffle your own Loved tracks; or automatically Love every track you post on your own blog, if you have one.

If you’re the type who likes to customize the way everything looks, you can now put a bird on it (or anything else for that matter).

It’s not live yet. In fact, this post wasn’t supposed to go live until 3pm. I’m not sure what happened with WordPress there, but I guess the cat is out of the bag now.

http://twitter.com/bwhitman Brian Whitman

love dan & etc, but there is no way they have 20 million “songs” in the same sense iTunes does. They may have indexed 20m mp3 files (and I also doubt that) but I am sure it is mostly duplicates. I tried quite a few very common queries and got 0 results.

http://blog.dankantor.com Dan Kantor

It’s live now everyone. Thanks for the great write-up Eliot!

http://blog.dankantor.com Dan Kantor

Brian, correct we don’t have 20m songs in the same sense as iTunes does. We never claimed that either. But we do have a lot more than 20m song links.